Snowden, NSA, blackmail, and the boys in the back room

So imagine this conversation taking place, in a car, on a lonely road outside Washington, late at night. The speakers are Congressman X and a private operative representing a covert unit inside the NSA:

“Well, Congressman, do you remember January 6th? A Monday afternoon, a men’s room in the park off—”

“What the hell are you talking about!”

“A stall in the men’s room. The kid. He was wearing white high-tops. A Skins cap. T-shirt. Dark hair. Scar across his left cheek.”

“Jesus.”

“We have very good audio and video. Anytime you want to watch it, let me know.”

Dead silence.

“What do you want?”

“Right now, Congressman? We want you to come down hard on Snowden. Press it. He’s a traitor. He should tried and convicted.”

The Congressmen pulls himself together:

“Yeah, well, there’s another side to this story. If Snowden gets enough support, if the wave rises high enough, the NSA could take a hit. I know a dozen Washington players who’d like that very much. They’re pissed off. They don’t like to be spied on. It’s possible Snowden was their guy from the beginning. I couldn’t say…”

Let’s make a deal. That ends up being the topic of this and other similar conversations inside the Beltway.

“Senator, we know about the underage cheerleader in Ohio. Your trip there in 2012, just before the election.”

“Look, you’ve brought this up before. But now I’ve got a trump card to play. Ed Snowden. This whole scandal can escalate like a tornado in Kansas, or it can die down…”

Let’s make a deal.

If you want to see this starkly played out in a fictional series, watch Netflix’s House of Cards. For House Majority Whip, Frank Underwood, substitute the NSA. Track what happens to Congressman Peter Russo, and you have a rough approximation.

Here’s another vector. A Congressman gets a visit from his favorite lobbyist, who works for a private defense contractor in the Congressman’s home state:

“Congressman, here’s the thing. The NSA is an integral part of our nation’s defense system. Right? This Snowden thing is messy. We want it to go away.”

“It may not go away. I’m not some kind of traffic cop who can put up his hand and stop the tide.”

“We understand that. I was just talking to XXX at NSA, and he’d really appreciate your help on this. Slam this bastard Snowden. Make him into the worst scumbag in the world.”

If you’re a Congressman or a Senator, and you know NSA is spying on you, because it’s spying on everyone in the Congress, who’s your potential best friend?

Somebody who can go up against the NSA.

And who might that be?

The CIA.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the best you can do. For years, the CIA has been watching the transformation of intelligence-gathering. The CIA been participating in that transformation: from humans using sources to obtain crucial data, to computers doing blanket-spying.

That’s the trend. It’s inescapable.

The big problem for the CIA is: their specialty is human intell. And when they go to computers, they’re second rate, behind the massive NSA machine.

Federal budget money for spying has been flowing in greater amounts to NSA and away from CIA.

This is one of the key elements of the turf war between CIA and NSA.

So if you’re a Congressman, you go to a friend in the CIA and you have a chat about “the NSA problem.” How can you get NSA off your back? Your CIA friend has his own concerns about NSA.

He tells you in confidence: “Look, maybe we can help you. We know a lot about the NSA. We have good people. You might say one of our jobs is watching the watchers at NSA, to, uh, make sure they don’t go too far in their spying.”

This sounds interesting. If you have to sell your soul, you’d rather sell it to the CIA than the NSA. It’s a judgment call.

And now…you read about Ed Snowden blowing a hole in the NSA. You take note of the fact that Snowden worked for the CIA. He worked for them in Geneva. Then he left for the private sector and got himself assigned to the NSA.

Hmm. Maybe you have some cause for optimism.

You, the Congressman, don’t give a damn about the NSA spying on all Americans all the time. You couldn’t care less about that. You just don’t want NSA looking over your own shoulder.

You know the incredibly naïve American public would never imagine what’s going on behind the scenes, with CIA, NSA, and Congress. The yokels and rubes in America actually believe their Congressional representatives are, well, representing them in Washington.

This fact is good. It means privacy for you: you can try to work out your problems without public scrutiny. You can play all the necessary games to hide your own secrets and crimes, and you can do it in back rooms.

Unless those bastards at NSA decide to leak one of your embarrassing secrets. That’s why you need your friend at CIA.

And now, again, you look at the recent article and see that Ed Snowden worked for the CIA. You hope he still is. You hope this a signal from the CIA that they’re taking a battering ram to the NSA.

Some schmuck reporter asks you about the current NSA scandal and you say, “Of course we have to protect classified data, in order to prevent terrorist attacks. But at the same time, we need to respect the Bill of Rights. People can’t go around spying on anyone for no reason.”

You’re sending your own signal.

You’re tipping your CIA guy. You appreciate his help, if in fact he’s helping you. You can’t ask him directly. If you did, he’d never give you a straight answer. But just in case…

As for the naïve rubes in your home state, the voters, you don’t give them a second thought. They’re not on your radar. They’re merely clusters of polling data, and you’ll look at the data when election comes around again. They don’t have a clue about how the game is played, and they never will.

You’re representing two defense contractors, a pharmaceutical company, a big AG corporation, and a bank. Those are your only true constituents. You give them all the time they need.

To keep those relationships on track, you only need to hide your peccadillos from embarrassing exposure. The hooker in DC, the bank account in Panama, the influence you used to move a sizable donation to a university where you intend to teach when you retire.

There are only two things you really need to think about in your job. First, what happens when your Party leaders come down the hall and tell you which way you’re going to vote on a bill—and you know your vote is going to upset one of your key constituents back home.

That’s a tricky situation. But you’ve been successful in keeping feathers from being ruffled. That pharmaceutical company understands you can’t side with their interests every single time.

You’ve got to go with your Party. The Pharma boys don’t like it, but they get it.

The other thing you’ve got to think about is darker. Nobody is going to give you stats on it, because stats don’t exist. Here’s how it shakes out:

How many people in Congress are so controlled by the NSA that they’d never try to break out? How many people, with how many secrets, are so blackmailed, they’d never dare go up against NSA?

This is an important calculation. The battle might already be lost. You might not stand a chance. Maybe nobody can help you. Maybe you can’t escape.

Maybe you shouldn’t even hint that NSA has overstepped its legal boundaries by spying on Americans.

That’s the conundrum that keeps you up at night.

What if the spies spying on their own government are running the government beyond the ability of anyone to stop them?

You don’t give a damn about what this would mean for America. You only care about what it means for you and your secrets.

Maybe this is the jail you’re in for the rest of your life.

When you’re back in your home state showing your face and giving speeches, and a voter comes up to you and voices a concern about his dwindling paycheck, his house payment, his endangered pension…and when you nod and gaze out at the horizon, as as if to pluck a magic answer from the aether, you’re really thinking about the conundrum.

You’re thinking about the life sentence you’re serving in the Surveillance State.

And that night, in your hotel room, you get down on your knees and pray that Ed Snowden is still working for the CIA.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

16 comments on “Snowden, NSA, blackmail, and the boys in the back room”

Deference to, and obedience to authority is the the most profound problem facing the human race.

It results from the failure to grow up and become responsible adults. This word, “responsible” has been redefined by the Public Relations Regime; narrowed down to mean “having a job” – and concurrent to that notion, following the orders of one’s boss.

Any nine year old, undamaged by conditioning and propaganda, is able to see through this sort of thing as unmitigated bullshit. That’s why “education” is compulsory.

It is clear enough that Amerikans aren’t going to sort this all out. Their enchantment will certainly outlast the crumbling infrastructure. And at the end of the line will be that Corporate Feudalism prepackaged and on sale for free.

It sounds like two factions of the same Cartel. I don’t know there is a good outcome to this, unless they mutually destroy each other. If the CIA is our savior, we’re in deep trouble. Both CIA/NSA have some explaining to do regarding 9.11.2001…probably blackmailing themselves back and forth on that one like a negative feedback loop. I don’t believe in White Hats or the Lone Ranger…just varying shades of grey. There is no honor among thieves. There is no fixing this…only a complete reset and wipe the board clean, absent that, I believe we are doomed.

And these fellas aren’t even the main players, they can be replaced like micro chips, and the machine doesn’t miss a beat. Are we doomed is a logical yes?
However a bigger picture exists that none of us can totally axes, hence my newly coins phrase, “it’s not over when it’s over”.

WHERE IS THE ESCAPE?
I am not at all sure that a “CIA Victory” in this Turf war would bring anything better for the country.
But, yes, the dirt has to come out. We need more whistleblower, and a safe exit for Snowden, might encourage more to follow his path

I am much more inclined to think that the NSA through its supercomputing and AI capabilities has identified and statistically verified a very large international organized crime ring based on central banking abuse and based in another nation which has infiltrated the US Government and others for purpose of manipulation for its own ends along with pursuit of rank immediate profit. In this case the Snowden op would be an attempt to derail and discredit the NSA in an effort to prevent it from successfully pursuing the crime ring.

As far as I know, NSA has no enforcement powers. Ever heard of NSA arresting someone? Never. Go think that one over for a while. NSA only gathers data which then is consumed by other agencies apparently on an as-needed basis.

This is not a CIA vs. NSA battle and in fact calling it such is an attempt to discredit both agencies under the well-known but very trite and unimaginative divide-and-conquer schema.

What all this is, is zionism trying to throw NSA off its trail.

Proof is that all this noise about the blanket spying came out about 5 years ago, died down, and nothing new has been added during the Snowden affair.

Proof is that we were told days ago by Greenwald that what had been said was only the tip of the iceberg of revelations to come from Snowden, but none of the rest of that alleged iceberg of revelations has been forthcoming from either him or Greenwald at all ever since.

I have no problem at all with Rappoport’s theory, but I think mine makes more sense, because the NSA has no way to blackmail anyone without another Federal agency or branch having to be directly involved.

The latter is certainly possible however if the Executive Branch has key buddies at NSA, which they probably do.

The big data is a snow job great money maker giving to jobs but the truth is that its all turning to slush so Edward was the secret plan to make for a better face make illusion for the mush coming off the optic cables.

Obama says: “Uhhhh….Duuuhhhh! Duuuuuhhh! Duuuuhhh! I’m the Transparency President! Duuuuhhh! Duuuuhhh! I’m the Great Socialist Savior of the Evil White-Man-Dominated United States! People have never had it so good before I came along! Everybody sing my praises while I go on $100 million dolla vacations! Duuuuhhhh! Duuuuhhhh! Duuuuhhh!”

Jon hit the nail on the head here. NSA is merely the “muscle” of the MIC, and Snowden is either a limited hangout or a total psy-op intended to freak out the populace and demonize China and Russia. Mission accomplished! Next stop: Syria!

PS: has anyone pondered whether Ed Snowden is at all related to Guy Snowden, the financial crook who used to run GTECH, the big state lottery / money laundering outfit? Ed’s father, Lonnie, appears to be just a retired military schlub (by itself an interesting connection), but could Guy be Ed’s favorite uncle or something? Just a thought.

I like Jon’s thinking on this. One thing we do know for sure is that within this whole Snowden Affair (AKA “The SnowJob”) SOMEONE is certainly getting blackmailed.
WHO THAT IS specifically, well that is alot of conjecture at this point, with great ideas all around.

When we look at the macro system unfolding before us, what we are ultimately presented with here is a vastly expanded police state, and that state can either GENUINELY READ ALL OUR COMMUNICATIONS…..or…wants the public to THINK that it can. It doesn’t matter which is true. If someone THINKS THAT THEY ARE BEING WATCHED…the damage is done. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon finally realized all these years later.

What Jon is getting at is that there is something vastly larger happening here, and it’s intimately tied into PERCEPTION of REALITY and PUBLIC FOCUS. What do the watchers want the public to focus on? What do they want the public to ignore? What do they want the public to accept?

In Orwell’s 1984, it’s common knowledge that you’re always under observation. Everyone ACCEPTS THE FACT. If you question it they haul you away. There is no debate permitted.

Persistence of belief is a powerful force. That wall can’t be broken through by pulling out a single brick here and there. No. The whole wall has to come down. And then, what are we left with? Our shattered ego’s if we are lucky.

We’ve known about this NSA spying stuff for ten years now. What’s changed? Think about it. What’s changed?

So… if this analysis is on target…What is going to be even more interesting than “act I” El corrido de Eddy Snowden….is the sequel…”act II”
AKA….The NSA “payback” ….Act one was a big hit, so…Act II should be hoving into view shortly, wouldn’t you think?